News from April 2008

Memories and articles from back in the day

Happy Birthday Web

I’m a lit­tle late on this for Australia, but in many parts of the world it is still April 30, so, Happy Fifteenth Birthday Web!

If you were a human you would be in the smack in the mid­dle of the very worst part of your spotty, rebel­lious, con­fused teenagerhood.

And no … Read more »

The future of journalism conference

Sadly this event has only just crossed our radars, but if you are in Sydney, and have an inter­est in news media, the Future of Journalism con­fer­ence today looks well worth attending.

If you are going, please send your reports of the day!

One step closer to the death of telemarketing

I like this as I do feel it is one step closer to one of the three things that I con­sider to be the worst three (mar­ket­ing) scourges on the planet: tele­mar­ket­ing. We all pay (hand­somely, thank you Telstra) for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing a land­line. I do not have … Read more »

Guerilla Usability Testing with Andy Budd — Sold Out

I hope every­one who really really wanted to get along to learn about prac­ti­cal usabil­ity test­ing with Clearleft’s Andy Budd next month in Melbourne has man­aged to get a ticket, because the news is that this work­shop, very pop­u­lar from the start, has now com­pletely sold out.

All of which … Read more »

There is no spoon

Via Flowing Data, a fan­tas­tic site which explores data visu­al­i­sa­tion, is this beau­ti­ful map of the United States, devel­oped by just one per­son, Ben Fry.

Ben Fry's map of the US

Only, there’s a catch.

This map has no topograhi­cal fea­tures. It has no geopo­lit­i­cal fea­tures. You can see … Read more »

John Allsopp speaking in Japan

For our myr­iad Japanese read­ers, I’ll be doing a num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tions in Tokyo in June, on micro­for­mats, CSS3, and the web beyond the desktop.

More details here.

New guide to women tech speakers

At Web Directions we’ve always had a strong com­mit­ment to diver­sity among our speak­ers, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to ensur­ing at least a rea­son­able rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women speak­ers. Many con­fer­ence organ­is­ers have lamented the dif­fi­culty of find­ing women speak­ers, some­thing which Jen Beckman helped address some time ago.

Now New Zealander … Read more »

Thanks to our supporter Acid Labs

Stephen Collins will be known to many in the web indus­try in Australia as a con­sul­tant, blog­ger, and big thinker on all things 2.0

Stephen’s also a great com­mu­nity con­trib­u­tor, hav­ing been one of the insti­ga­tors of the recent BarCamp Canberra. He’s also the founder of acid­labs, one of our … Read more »

Sleeveface — Amusing Flickr Meme

OK, the pur­pose of this exer­cise isn’t really to show you this meme, which you’ve prob­a­bly seen any­way: Sleeveface.

What I’m pon­der­ing here, for my own rea­sons is, why do some memes work and oth­ers do not? With about 1300 entries (a lot of them from the same peo­ple), I’d … Read more »

Making the most of a conference

There’s no doubt attend­ing a con­fer­ence is a very big invest­ment of time, money and effort. So, how do you make the most of that invest­ment? Neerav Bhatt has a very detailed post at his blog, look­ing at the things you can do before, dur­ing and after attend­ing an … Read more »

Final resource from WDN08 — Indi Young’s Innovation with Mental Models

Innovation with Mental Models was one of my favourite pre­sen­ta­tions from Web Directions North this year. Indi, not to men­tion the clients she did the work for, was incred­i­bly gen­er­ous with the detailed descrip­tion of her men­tal mod­els approach to user research and prod­uct design.

Fascinating, can­did con­tent pre­sented … Read more »

Melbourne — Next Wave Festival

If full days at Web Directions User Experience isn’t enough for you and you’re han­ker­ing for more cul­ture “after hours”, check out the site for the Next Wave Festival, which starts on May 15 and goes through until May 31. Lots and lots of events, exhi­bi­tions, instal­la­tions, per­for­mances and … Read more »

Barcamp Canberra wrap

As we all prob­a­bly know, an impor­tant event occurred in Canberra, the nations Capital this week­end just gone. And there was the 20/​20 Summit as well.

Of course I’m talk­ing about Barcamp Canberra, held at the Australian National University lat Saturday.

A fan­tas­tic turnout, of 60 or more atten­dees, … Read more »

Thanks to our supporters, Funnelback

A num­ber of sup­port­ers and exhibitors are com­ing on board for our upcom­ing events, and we are very thank­ful for their sup­port. We still have a num­ber of really great value expo and spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties, so if your com­pany is inter­ested in build­ing con­nec­tions with lead­ing Australian web pro­fes­sion­als in … Read more »

Upcoming RIA events from Microsoft and Adobe

Rich Internet Applications, a term increas­ingly used for desk­top like web appli­ca­tions, or hybrid web appli­ca­tions, devel­oped with tech­nolo­gies like Flash, Silverlight, AIR and oth­ers are gain­ing increas­ing atten­tion among web design­ers and developers.

If you are inter­ested in learn­ing more about these spe­cific tech­nolo­gies and their use, Adobe and Microsoft … Read more »

Web Directions Speakers in the press — Laurel Papworth

One of our very favourite Web Directions speak­ers, social media/​network/​software guru Laurel Papworth has hit the big time. No, not a gig at the 2020 Summit, but even bet­ter — an inter­view on morn­ing TV. Through the magic of YouTube, see Laurel on “9am with David and Kim”.… Read more »

Breaking news: UCD is dead

Looks like the Jared Spool has set the cat amongst the pigeons at the IA Summit by mak­ing the claim that “UCD was an out-​​dated method­ol­ogy that should be retired by the UX com­mu­nity”. Strong words.

Check the full story includ­ing Jared’s com­plete thoughts in this blog post.

All Web Directions North slides and podcasts now online

There was a whole host of gen­uinely excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tions at Web Directions North back in January. The good news for peo­ple who weren’t there is that so many of the pre­sen­ters were incred­i­bly gen­er­ous with their knowl­edge and exper­tise and have allowed us to pub­lish their slides and podcasts.

Check them … Read more »

Who’s this Jason Ryan guy?

You might have noticed we’ve got an optional extra break­fast included in the pro­gram at out up com­ing Canberra event, Web Directions Government. If you work in gov­ern­ment, and you have any inter­est at all in the excit­ing Government 2.0 things they have been doing … Read more »

Early Bird closes tonight

A quick note for any­one inter­ested in com­ing to Web Directions Government or User Experience. Save $100 by reg­is­ter­ing before mid­night tonight.

Classic nerdy time waster

Looking to while away a nice 20 minute block on this Thursday after­noon? Prove to your­self just how clever you really are with The Rather Difficult Font Game. And if that’s not enough, and you’d pre­fer to stray way off topic and not even kid your­self that this is … Read more »

Early Bird for Melbourne and Canberra closes Thursday at midnight

Just a cou­ple of days to go now to take advan­tage of our early bird pric­ing of $100 off Web Directions Government and User Experience. So, to get to either of these con­fer­ences for just $495 (includ­ing GST), fully catered, with won­der­ful speak­ers like Andy Budd, Robert … Read more »

Web Standards group Melbourne next week

Next week on the Wednesday the 23rd I have the plea­sure and hon­our of speak­ing at the Melbourne Web Standards Group, along with Gerry Gaffney.

Gerry will be speak­ing on How users really search, while I’ll be pre­sent­ing a vari­a­tion on the ses­sion I did with Dave Shea at Web … Read more »

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

and cure cancer…

Despite news­pa­per sub-​​editors love hyper­bole (hey you are read­ing this aren’t you) some­times the sen­sa­tion­ally head­lined arti­cles are worth reading.

In last year’s clos­ing keynote pre­sen­ta­tion, the inspir­ing Mark Pesce men­tioned the adop­tion of mobile phones in the fish­ing mar­kets of Kerala in south­ern India, and how … Read more »

Buy a pixel, return someone’s sight

Need to bump up your karma points before the excesses of the week­end? Do some­thing for some­one else today and you could remain guilt free for the whole weekend.

The guys over at Adobe’s Sydney office have set up MillionEyesofSite as part of a team build­ing pro­gram. Between 4.30pm on … Read more »

Resources from Web Directions North

We’ve just gone live with a whole bunch of resource pages from Web Directions North 2008. For rea­sons too elab­o­rate to bore you with here I decided to date stamp these back in February, so they might not be show­ing up in your reader.

Here’s those we have pub­lished so far … Read more »

Early Bird pricing extension for Web Directions Government and User Experience

It is hard to push through fund­ing approvals to get to some­thing like Web Directions. There’s been a bit of clam­our about there sim­ply not being enough time before early bird pric­ing ended, so we’ve decided to extend the cut­off date until next Thursday April 17 at midnight.

So now you … Read more »

Web Directions South 2008 survey closes

Thanks so much to the 85 peo­ple who took the time to share with us your thoughts on con­tent for Web Directions South 2008. There are lots and lots of inter­est­ing new ideas in there — check out the spread­sheet here. In par­tic­u­lar it was great to hear about … Read more »

Video on Flickr

My first response is that I like the way Flickr are doing this. In a move which is light­weight, sim­ple, restrained and hum­ble, pro users can now upload video clips up to 90 sec­onds long.

I like it because I think it’s going to fos­ter some­thing dif­fer­ent to most of … Read more »

Powerhouse Museum joins The Commons on Flickr

More gen­uine awe­some­ness. Our very own Powerhouse Museum, just today, has become the first museum to join The Commons on Flickr. They will be upload­ing pho­tos from The Tyrell Collection, a series of glass­plate neg­a­tives from around the turn of the cen­tury, to their Flickr stream. Sections of … Read more »

Image is everything

One seri­ous draw­back of mov­ing house in Australia is you’ll typ­i­cally wait no small time to get your inter­net con­nec­tion moved. For the last three weeks, I’ve been in this sit­u­a­tion, and as con­nec­tion is not an option, I’ve needed and alter­na­tive until some­one could be both­ered pro­vid­ing me with … Read more »

Cameron Adams — The Man in Blue

He’s pre­sented to rooms packed with some of the tough­est audi­ences in the busi­ness at 66% of Web Directions Conferences, and sur­vived the hor­rors of build­ing a site with me as the client.

Cameron: Why have you used an anchor ele­ment with no con­tent here when you could have added the … Read more »

Web Directions North Podcasts

Late last week we started releas­ing the pod­casts from Web Directions North in January. Shortly I’m going to be gath­er­ing them all together into com­plete resources pages, with the MP3s, slides and any other mate­ri­als we have, that will be hosted here at the Web Directions site. But if … Read more »

If I were…

If I were a fresh faced young CS under­grad­u­ate I would be onto the this oppor­tu­nity to work for very good guys at Freshview (think Campaign Monitor and Mailbuild) like white on rice.

If I were a woman with my fin­ger on the pulse of the Aussie startup scene I’d … Read more »

Excellent typography presentation from Jeff Croft

The pos­si­bil­ity of truly excel­lent typog­ra­phy on the web, a la that beau­ti­ful book The Elements of Typographic Style, has been a real­ity for the last cou­ple of years. Check out the MP3 of Jeff Croft’s pre­sen­ta­tion, Typography — Beyond the Font at last year’s Webmaster Jam Session, … Read more »

Sebastian Chan: DJ by night, web pioneer by day

Years ago I used to love lis­ten­ing to 2SER Radio in the after­noons, I think it was between 1pm and 4pm, when every after­noon a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent pre­sen­ters would come in and play some of the finest music radio I have ever heard. Just good, inter­est­ing, largely dance … Read more »

Reminder — Early bird pricing for Melbourne and Canberra runs out April 11

We know it can take for­ever to get those approvals to go through, but don’t for­get that to take advan­tage of the early bird price of just $495 for Web Directions Government or Web Directions User Experience, you need to get that reg­is­tra­tion in by Friday April 11. … Read more »

Design Coding by the SEO Rapper

Raising the bar for in house pre­sen­ta­tions on the ben­e­fits of web stan­dards, the SEO Rapper really knows his stuff: